Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Intel DG31DL Power Settings

This motherboard is pretty easy to set up for WOL, but it came from the shop with S1 standby mode enabled. We really want S3 standby mode. My Kill-a-Watt meter shows the following on this average core duo machine:

On

S5 (Off)

S3 (Sleep)

S1 (Sleep)

67 Watts

6.03 Watts

7.37 Watts

40.2 Watts

So trolling throughthe BIOS we find:

On Board LAN is on

Wake on LAN from S5 is Power On

EIST (speed step) is enabled for additional power savings

Suspend state is S3

The 'Wake system from S5' option is a clock based startup feature (disabled)

Back in the windows NIC adaptor properties:

The power management tab is showing, so WOL is enabled in the BIOS.

Allow the computer to turn off the device to save power is checked

(wake on lan still seems to work anyway)

Allow the device to bring the computer out of standby is checked.

Only allow management stations to bring the computer out of standby is checked.

(wake on lan still is tested to work)

A couple more settings in Windows:

Here on the advanced tab we can check that only "Magic Packet" is selected and not "Directed Packet" which tends to bring the machine out of standby any time it receives a broadcast packet.

This is the Wake on Link setting. It's disabled. Strange idea. Suppose you could boot 100 or 1,000 PCs by just turning on your network hub this way.